Posted
by
timothy
on Saturday January 11, 2014 @08:26AM
from the wasn't-there-didn't-do-it-and-I-shot-the-only-witness dept.

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Conor Friedersdorf has written a tongue-in-cheek article in The Atlantic advising New Jersey Governor Chris Christie how he can use the NSA playbook to successfully defend himself of the charges that a senior member of his staff was involved in shutting down George Washington Bridge traffic, a stunt meant to punish the mayor of an affected town for opposing his reelection. Christie's NSA-inspired explanation would include the following points: There are almost 9 million people in New Jersey, and only one was targeted for retribution, an impressively tiny error rate lower than .001 percent; The bridge closure was vital to national security because [redacted]; Since the George Washington Bridge is a potential terrorist target, everything that may or may not have happened near it is a state secret; Going after a political rival is wrong but it's important to put this event in context; Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich was the only target of non-compliant behavior. No other Fort Lee resident was ever targeted for retribution, and any delays that any Fort Lee resident experienced were totally inadvertent and incidental; Finally a panel will be formed to figure out how to restore the public's faith in Chris Christie. "To some readers, these talking points may seem absurd or deliberately misleading," concludes Friedersdorf, "but there isn't any denying that so far they're working okay for the NSA.""

“Chris Christie is dealing with a scandal after it was revealed that a top aide shut down access to the George Washington Bridge to get back at a Democratic mayor for not endorsing him. Christie was furious when they blocked the bridge because he thought they said they were blocking the fridge.” –Jimmy Fallon

Oh, come on. This was revealed, what? Two days ago? You're angry because convictions don't happen instantaneously? You can get angry about this is in a few months when we find out that the prosecutor has decided to drop the investigation. You're really jumping the gun here.

it is really telling that the public official closed the bridge illegally and nobody is sitting in jail for this.

"Telling?" If you look at politics, this is business as usual. Bush, Obama, Clinton, Reagan, they all have done much worse. Christie just was particularly stupid because he acted on something that's a bit sensitive and exercised his power out of complete pettiness instead of advancing his career through it. But by the time the next election comes around, voters will have forgotten even this.

There's this concept called "Due Process". Prosecutors investigate what happened, decide if someone should be charged. Then there's this thing called a trial. If someone is finally found guilty they might go to jail.

At this point there is absolutely no evidence that Christie knew his staff was involved. But Democrats will be harping on the "scandal" for the next three years because Christie is the biggest threat to the gravy train they've been enjoying for the past five years.

Yet. No one is sitting in jail, yet. This was just uncovered. Everyone involved is already punished to some degree though. The public official was fired. The political adviser was not only fired but was told he would not be eligible to work as a consultant for any Republican governor again.

It is really telling that your entire list refers to a certain Democratic president, and mixes in things that (in your opinion) are bad policy. There are plenty of legitimate complaints about corruption in government, and then there are partisan shills. By acting as the latter, you demonstrate that you have no real concern about the former.

By labeling that poster a "shill" you are obviously attempting to delegitimize the criticism over policy matters. Should we likewise label you a "shill" acting in defense of the administration or its policies? Apparently nobody here can hold an opinion without being a "shill." That does get to be tedious.

It is really telling that your entire list refers to a certain Democratic president, and mixes in things that (in your opinion) are bad policy.

If you're going to criticize the President that is actually in power you are stuck criticizing Obama at the moment. Don't you think it is fair to criticize him for the policies and actions of his administration?

You call him a "shill," and yet you are attacking the commenter for criticizing the only president in power he can comment on, not the comments. What does that make you?

Can we store your comment until after the next election and flip "Democrat" to "Republican" to use on you? It will probably be ju

He's a shill because he's phrasing his criticism of the president (in the middle of a conversation about the governor of New Jersey) in a way that implies neutrality. He claims to be talking about corruption in government, and yet for some reason every one of his examples (other than "the fed") is either related to the president or is claimed to relate to the president. Again, in a conversation that has nothing to do with the president.

The reason he ignored GP's comments is because it's been done to death. Anyone reading this who doesn't know the reasoning behind each of those is blinded by partisanship.

Briefly though, because the Solyndra BS pisses me off more than any of the others:

I would fucking *love it* if the federal government would start making solar panels and selling them to people directly, but certain agitators would start screaming about socialism if the money isn't given to private interests instead. When you give money to to private companies there's always the chance that they'll go bankrupt. That's how it works. If you look at the whole program, rather than just at Solyndra, most of the companies did fine - a better success rate than most programs like this one.

I would fucking *love it* if the federal government would start making solar panels and selling them to people directly, but certain agitators would start screaming about socialism if the money isn't given to private interests instead.

Why? It's not the federal government's job to make solar panels. And given how incompetent they are about anything else, I can't imagine why you'd want them to.

Government programs are usually, not always, more efficient than private counterparts. Medicare, for example, operates at an 8% overhead, while insurance companies were complaining that the 15% overhead that the Affordable Care Act allows them was untenable. The advantage that private industry has is in innovation, not efficiency.

It's the government's job to promote the economy and maintain public resources. In this case that meant pushing clean energy, both as a long-term economic goal and as a means of

Medicare, for example, operates at an 8% overhead, while insurance companies were complaining that the 15% overhead that the Affordable Care Act allows them was untenable.

And Medicare doesn't do proper checks for fraud. Keep in mind that a lot of the insurer overhead is put in place by the same government which doesn't put that same burden on Medicare. Going back to the solar power example, the US government would probably "streamline" its manufacturing by waiving itself from the more burdensome EPA and OSHA regulation, just like it did in the past with nuclear power.

If we're looking to flood the country with solar panels then we can do it ourselves, there's no need to go through some roundabout public/private process.

Protip: we're not looking to flood the country with solar panels. This is a great example of why governments

When the government becomes a corporation it's called fascism. The government's (economic) job is to create the rules of trade (ie: "The market") in a way that spreads the benefits of said trade to society as a whole, ideally everyone is "Free" to use the "Market". Having said that, international "cap and trade" is the only "free market" answer to the tragedy of the commons.

If you look at the whole program, rather than just at Solyndra, most of the companies did fine - a better success rate than most programs like this one.

Just because companies haven't gone bankrupt yet doesn't mean that they have succeeded.

I'm looking at Abengoa SA, for example. They got almost $3 billion in guaranteed loans through this program to build infrastructure worth a fraction of that. I don't see that ending pretty, especially with their likely exposure (being the largest Spanish sustainable energy business) to the Spanish solar power industry, which completely lost its government subsidies over the past few years.

Can we store your comment until after the next election and flip "Democrat" to "Republican" to use on you?

I suppose this is a rhetorical question, and my answer is irrelevant, but still, I suggest you do not.

The left/right paradigm makes all proper debate useless, and makes people entrenched in one of two positions, forever allowing such things like this to happen in the first place. Like the goats in Animal Farm, people who do these things kill all discussion.

Therefore, it was wrong to bring up the left/right paradigm when this guy did it, and it will be wrong to do it when the other group of puppets are in po

You are correct that he should not have brought the Fed's stimulus into this discussion and probably not Solyndra or PPACA (at least not the way in which he did). However, the point to note is that the media have already spent more time covering the bridge closing than it has the IRS targeting Obama political opponents (both in slow walking applications for non-profit status and starting audits against those who have spoken out about problems with PPACA), or on the Fast & Furious gun running by the BATF

It is really telling that your entire list refers to a certain Democratic president, and mixes in things that (in your opinion) are bad policy.

You're right. Maybe we should do something about that guy.

But we won't. When Nixon did similar stuff, the Republican senators went to him and told him it was time to go. He resigned in disgrace. The Republican senators and representatives were punished mercilessly for it and lost many seats in Congress. The Democrats have learned the lesson well - in this age of widespread ignorance their political fortunes depend more on the popularity of their president or presidential candidate than it does on th

He is still the less steaming pile of shit compared to the alternative: Quantum Romney, who holds a superposition of all possible political positions, until one starts to observe him closely, then he will collapse to a position according to the respective political convictions of the observer. I think the main problem with Barack Obama is that he is only interested in his social programs and does not really care about anything else, leaving it to the persons in the departements and then staunchly supporting

It is really telling that the ATF gave over 2500 guns to Mexican drug cartels, and no one from the ATF, DOJ, or Obama Administration is sitting in jail.It is really telling that the IRS targeted political opponents during an election year, and no one from the IRS, DOT, or Obama Administration is sitting in jail.It is really telling that Obama campaign donors at Solyndra got $500,000,000 of tax payer money, promptly went bankrupt, and no one from the DOE is sitting in jail.It is really telling that the Fed prints $75,000,000,000 a month, totaling over $4,000,000,000,000 in the last 5 years, and no one from the fed is sitting in jail.It is really telling that the president himself breaks the PPACA on a daily basis by announcing parts he will be temporarily or permanently not enforcing, and he's not sitting in jail.

Wow, that's a fun list. I count 3... 4? outright lies, 4 completely made up scandals, 1 thing taken completely out of context, several words that don't mean what you think they mean, and a complete lack of understanding as to how civics works.

It's always fun to debunk these kinds of lists, because I always learn something new, usually something that makes me proud of what our country is doing.

The only sad thing is that it takes me hours and the people posting them will either blindly ad hominem them ("YOU LINKED DAILYKOS THAT MEANS YOU ACTIVATED MY TRAP CARD~!~!"), call me a "liberal commy fagg 'MERICA hater", or ignore me and go right back to posting about how Obama was raised by Karl Marx on the Socialist Moonbase on the dark side of Mars or something. Or go back to quoting from the sites those guys run. Same difference, really.

2. Ditto for the IRS scandal, which was also made up. Darrel Issa asked the investigator to ignore the fact that the IRS was looking at all groups claiming to be charities, as they are REQUIRED TO DO BY LAW, and merely provide him talking points on Republican ones. The real scandal? The IRS failed to notice 10 out of 11 of the Koch brothers fake charities were fake charities. You'll note that Issa doesn't even bother talking about this one anymore, he's too busy trying to use Benghazi to kneecap President Hilary Clinton before her 2016 victory.http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/06/26/1219172/-Here-s-how-Darrell-Issa-manufactured-the-IRS-scandal [dailykos.com]

3. Solyndra's loan was one of Bush's projects, not Obama's, and there's a HUGE difference between George Kaiser (a billionaire who raised a whopping 50-100k for Obama) and the Kaiser Family Foundation (a charity he started). There's a whole boatload more of made up crap about Solyndra, it's a very transparent manufactured scandal to try and drive us away from Solar and Wind technologies -- because oil will never run out or anything. I'll just leave this link as an exercise to the reader:http://ourfuture.org/20120926/the-phony-solyndra-solar-scandal [ourfuture.org]

4. Literally not true. The "Fed prints $75,000,000,000" is such a common meme that there are so many Tea Party sites shatting it out that it's hard to discover it's source. Took a while, but I found it - The fed is buying back a bunch of T-Bonds and Mortgage Bonds at the rate of 75 billion a month as part of the stimulus package, but that's not "printing money." The Feds have a FAQ entry up on it here, for those who don't roll

I read the one about fast and furious that you said was completely made up (Over 200 dead Mexicans disagree), so I followed you link, even though it was Huff Post. I figured the Huff Post would have a link to where the information that it was fake would be. It didn't even MENTION Fast and Furious.

Were you just posting random links hoping people wouldn't follow them? It talked about the IRS scadal, and I've read the DNC talking points on that and they are all lies. No right wing group got tax exempt status for over 2 year, a process that is not to take longer than 90 days. Because of that many donors could not donate until they got the status. I've yet to find a source to debunk that bit of fact.

So I stopped following your talking points because they appear to be just made up with random links.

All they did was fuck up tracking guns that were sold to known drug runners by people whose idea of tracking gun sales is to write them on rolls of toilet paper and whose idea of background checks is to look behind the guy.

No, it's worse than that. They simply didn't track these weapons or notify Mexican authorities that they were doing this (Mexican authorities learned about Fast and Furious when the scandal became public via whistleblowers after the death of a US Border Patrol agent involving two guns from the program), and the gun sellers were in on the alleged sting and were authorized by the ATF agents involved to sell those weapons as they did.

In addition, the Sinaloa Cartel got a free ticket for at least a year to smuggle guns and who knows what else into Mexico in addition to those 2000 or so guns. Maybe it was a sting and maybe it was substantial aid for a favored cartel.

He's half right, Solyndra started the process to get the loan in 2007. Should Obama have known to cut them off halfway through? Who knows... They didn't get the money then "promptly go bankrupt" though.

Yes, he should have cut off the process. And yes, they did go promptly bankrupt [washingtonpost.com] since they were out of cash in about 15 months of getting the loan money and bankrupt in two years.

Your point for 4 is no better than what was originally stated. It's still very bad monetary policy.

And for 5 you're the one spreading bullshit. The republicans have been unable to pass anything to actually get in the way of Obamacare. Sure republican governors have opted out of building exchanges but the law gave then that choice. What the law didn't do was allow insurance to be sold across state lines, which would have only required a federal exchange. It was a colossal miss by the law. Oh and the gp post is correct Obama's constant executive changing of the law is sure as hell completely illegal.

If there is no meaningful inflation in the monetary system, the economy drives to a halt.

This is demonstrably untrue. Look at inflation charts through time, and you will see there are clear periods when the US money supply was deflating, but the economy was growing.

This is why gold is such a failure as a currency.

It didn't fail as a currency. In the US, the government confiscated all the gold in the country because it couldn't pay its debts. Gold (and silver) worked fine as a currency for centuries before that. (Note: I don't favor a return to the gold standard, I think there are better options, but saying 'gold is a failure' is ridiculous. I

With respect to 4, no the Federal Reserve is not "literally printing money", however the money deposited in the reserve accounts of the member banks is indeed new money. This can be fairly described euphemistically as "printing money." The important question is whether the increase in the money supply risks inflation. Currently, it doesn't look like it. And now we are starting to move into the "remove the punch bowl" phase of monetary policy with reductions in the buying program. As the Federal reserve even

1. The fed will _never_ allow a federal bond auction to not be fully subscribed at a rate below real inflation.
2. The SS trust fund has a metric ass-load of bonds and few suckers to buy them.
3. The Bonds are the feds 'reserves'. See also fractional reserve banking. (Fed Bond Holdings x Money multiplier) is the real money supply growth in this ring of the circus.
4. The whole fucking money printing is part of an economic war intended to get the god damn Ch

I don't have time to go into everything, and in fact most of the list doesn't interest me that much.

But the IRS scandal wasn't hatched a couple days before the national press finally noticed. The IRS behavior was being noticed and complained about for many many months before it became widespread knowledge. You probably heard about the IRS being used as a political weapon in spring of 2013.

That link is to a completely unrelated story about the IRS. I was hoping you had some proof, because that was the first time I've heard that Fast and Furious was all bullshit. So I searched the same website for more info and didn't find anything to support your claim. What I did find was an article from july 2013 talking about two more deaths in mexico linked to those guns - not something I'd expect to see from "huffpo" if the scandal had been debunked.

That link is to a completely unrelated story about the IRS. I was hoping you had some proof, because that was the first time I've heard that Fast and Furious was all bullshit. So I searched the same website for more info and didn't find anything to support your claim. What I did find was an article from july 2013 talking about two more deaths in mexico linked to those guns - not something I'd expect to see from "huffpo" if the scandal had been debunked.

Does anything you brought up matter to the overall point that government is in the habit of breaking it's own laws?

Fast and Furious lost "strength" as a scandal because gun walking was revealed to be a "standard" technique implemented at a local level. There's questionable legal and moral basis for this, regardless of whose fault it is politically. There's a big difference between something seen as a "fake scandal" and something which "didn't happen." Gun walkin

I don't care about Solyndra, but saying, "The Fed is not printing money, they are buying bonds" is about the same as saying a paypal transfer is not giving someone money. The Fed is buying bonds with money they create, their explicit goal is to increase the money supply. Of course, it's not exactly a scandal, and it's not Obama'

The treasury disagrees [treasury.gov].
We know that it wasn't just "management practicing CYA" because of later testimony revealing that the applications matching keywords were required to be sent to the main IRS headquarters, where they were delayed.

It's a story that has been unveiled (is still being unveiled?) in multiple layers, so it's easy to get 'story fatigue' and stop paying attention to it after a while.

If I had made that list it would focus on two events
* The closing of national parks, blocking of scenic overlooks, etc. that were often unnecessary and in fact more expensive than not doing them during the government shutdown. The President was attempting to blame Republicans for pain he was inflicting..
* The IRS targeting of conservative groups that effectively prevented them from having a strong effect during the 2012 election.

It is really telling that our 'leaders' are criminals, and that they employ people that we commonly call 'the police' to uphold laws, and that those 'police' guys are so 'blinded by their own sense of importance' that they won't put their bosses in jail, all because of 'the chain of command'. It's this 'chain of command', and why it's followed as it currently is, that's the real telling thing in America these days.

At some point The People are going to wake up to the fact that criminals run this place in

It is really telling that the ATF gave over 2500 guns to Mexican drug cartels, and no one from the ATF, DOJ, or Obama Administration is sitting in jail.
It is really telling that the IRS targeted political opponents during an election year, and no one from the IRS, DOT, or Obama Administration is sitting in jail.
It is really telling that Obama campaign donors at Solyndra got $500,000,000 of tax payer money, promptly went bankrupt, and no one from the DOE is sitting in jail.
It is really telling that the Fed prints $75,000,000,000 a month, totaling over $4,000,000,000,000 in the last 5 years, and no one from the fed is sitting in jail.
It is really telling that the president himself breaks the PPACA on a daily basis by announcing parts he will be temporarily or permanently not enforcing, and he's not sitting in jail.

Nothing happens about the list because no laws were broken. What you have is a list of government policies you personally disagree with. No matter who you vote for there will always be government policies that you find distasteful. Democratic nations do not throw political opponents in jail for enacting such policy, they simply vote them out of office and start bitching about the new guy.

Haven't RTFA, but if he did break a specific law then all that needs to happen is someone (say a political opponent) m

In 2010, Christie took the unprecedented step of refusing to reappoint a New Jersey Supreme Court justice for another term, which set off the New Jersey Democrats, who got back at Christie by shooting down all the other Supreme Court justice nominees he put forward.

So when a Republican member of the New Jersey Supreme Court came up for reappointment last year, NJ Senate Democrats promised to make it a brutal fight, so Christie decided to stop the reappointment. He was furious at Senate Democrats, and held a press conference getting really angry with them.

That press conference, expressing much anger with Senate Democrats, was held on August 12, 2013, a day before the Bridgegate e-mail was sent. And Fort Lee, the town that got backed up, is part of the legislative district represented by Loretta Weinberg, the leader of the Senate Democrats.

An interesting theory, but I think it goes to prove once more that Christie doesn't like the fact that people commute to New York for work. Remember when he shut down a financed infrastructure project that would have helped the economy immensely and would have reduced road traffic -- well, until he shut it down based on fake reasons and outright lies? I'm talking about the second railway tunnel crossing the Hudson, for those to ADS to remember.

i'm not saying the NSA did it. but how easy would it have been for it to do so?

i'm not even saying the NSA would be pursing this as policy. the NSA is not an iron machine, it's composed of people. there's greed and corruption everywhere. for every virtuous edward snowden, there's another guy like edward snowden who knows a political operative and would do what snowden did, but for the motivation of cash instead. sell this kind of info for six or seven figures

that's how dangerous the NSA is to democracy. infiltrate the NSA, abuse its powers as an employee, destroy the legitimacy of our government with the leaks and manipulations you are now capable of

we live in a world where the NSA can decide presidential elections, or any elections. right now. everyone has dirt on them. focus on the candidates you want to weed out, get dirt like this bridge fiasco on them, leak it to the media, and voila: you decide elections

this is why the NSA has to be curtailed. it is incompatible with democracy. the NSA will destroy this country, make everyone believe their government is fake

the NSA must be made transparent, congressional oversight bolted on, its scope of powers severely reduced, etc. secret courts? what the fuck? no! not acceptable

It wasn't to punish someone who wouldn't endorse him. That's just a flashpoint scandal, nothing big. I half suspect it to be one that's being sent out intentionally to exhaust the media's attention before the real scandal starts getting out.

Basically he screwed over some Democratic Judge, and the Dems in his area announced they would be very critical of a Republican Judge that was coming up for reconfirmation in retaliation, so he pulled the same screwjob on that Republican Judge to prevent her from being questioned by the Dems. The next day he pulled the bridgegate crap in the home district of the head Democrat.

When Rupert Murdoch and couple of other billionaires started their own network in the 1980s and Fox News in the 1990s, they intentionally wanted the network to be on the right side of the political spectrum because they felt that part of the US market was being under served by other news outlets. After all, Regan was big then, the DEmocrats still had a strangle hold on Congress and the Conservatives had non outlet that catered to them.

Flash forward 25 years and the country as a whole has moved more to the right. So, hows does Fox News differentiate itself now?

By being so wacky right wing that they have become a parody of themselves. Colbert is making a real nice living by just accentuating some of the rhetoric - not adding too much to it, BTW.

That's how ridiculous they have become.

When I see commentators and anchors talk out of their ass; like blaming the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 on the financial meltdown; which it turns out it had nothing - zero - contribution to the financial meltdown.

Fox News narrative is now scaring old white people. My doctors office has it on (all those old white people live it) and the BS that comes out of those people's mouths makes me wonder how these people can keep a straight face - actually I can - they millions of dollars a year to read the BS the Fox writers come up with.

Also, notice how all the "anchors" are pretty MILFs with short skirts and hooker/stripper heels?

All of the women on Fox News look like strippers.

Infotainment, baby! with shitty half truths and lies.

And parroting what they see on that shitty lying network. I've actually talked to people who were convinced that we the US will become just like Greece and they put their life savings into Gold - when it was pushing $2,000 an ounce (it since has fallen 40%). Guess where they got that idea from?

Recently Christie had unloaded on Democrats in a particularly angry press conference concerning the renomination battle of a N.J. Supreme Court judge, a battle that had been several years in the making. The woman who headed the state Senate committee causing embarrassment for Christie at the time was N.J. state Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg (D), who happens to represent Fort Lee.

So by looking a Chris Christie's friends what can we determine from him? All of his friends seem to be petty, vindictive, bullies. Then when things go bad, it is every man for themselves which shows a lack of loyalty since everyone except Christie has had to resign. It won't be long until one of his friends turns on him, but then it will be an all out character assassination against that old friend.

This little stunt happened on the first day of school, messing with kids and communities on a stressful first day, the people of NY & NJ, interstate commerce, and possible security and emergency services.

Some of the friends are going to need a timeout, where big people go for timeout. A little jail time.

Bill Clinton's staffers went around prying the W keys off the keyboards [gao.gov] in the White House before George W. Bush moved in (among other things), but we don't automatically accuse Clinton himself of being petty and moronic because of that.

The NSA's "defense" is not "working well." Except maybe with Democrats and Republicans who wish Snowden never existed. For a lot of the rest of the population NSA excuses are making things worse for them, not better.

This sort of thing is what politicians do every day. There is essentially no legal way to hold the guy responsible.

The only people who can punish Christie are voters. Hopefully they will do just that, although the fact that both Bush and Obama got reelected doesn't make me very confident that voters care about abuse of power.

So if I have this right (regardless what caused these assholes to close the bridge), then if terrorists hate the American government, they take it out on The People of America (Oklahoma City Bombing, 9/11, Boston Marathon, etc...), and now if the American government hates the American government, they take it out on The People of America, too. Ouch, my country hurts!

As a non-USA-citizen, I don't have any stake in the outcome, but I'm really curious to see how this affects Christie's run for the White House. Is this a big enough problem to derail his carefully crafted "Pragmatic, bi-partisan, get stuff done" persona, or will it blow over?

My personal take, FWIW, is that he either knew and is lying, or he didn't and is a schmuck because his whole team leadership lied to him for months and he didn't catch on. If I was a voter I would be asking myself, "What if this guy is elected president, and then one day gets mad at me?"

Christie has already dealt with the scandal. He fired everyone responsible, apologized to the victims and made sure that anyone involved in the bad decision making will not be involved in further decision making. The premise of summary is that Christie should try to downplay the impact of the harm done by the closure. But he didn't do that. He accepted the responsibility (so no attempt to downplay the impact) and dealt with the issue promptly.

Too late for all that. Christie allready apologized at length and fired the staffer involved. I don't get it anyway. How was closing lanes to a bridge going to hurt the mayor of Fort Lee? It inconvenienced a lot of the people in the area but they overwhelmingly voted for Christie anyway. The whole thing sounds idiotic. Is he hiring 7th graders for his staff or something? I would have broken his legs or something if I was angry with him. A traffic jam? Really?

I don't get it anyway. How was closing lanes to a bridge going to hurt the mayor of Fort Lee?

The mayor was definitely annoyed, he was personally frantic, trying to get someone to open the lanes.

I don't understand it either (frankly, I don't understand the thought processes of anyone involved in the email exchanges, and I'm beginning to think I don't understand the thought processes of anyone in New Jersey).

It's always useful to deny everything first. Later when you apologize that's the image the public will remember.

For politicians denying everything is the first step. If one assumes guilt first one surely must have something hidden... As per drama the honesty only comes after a struggle and self-realization. That's more natural to sympathize with.

felrom, do you get paid for this? That's your second partisan shill post. There's an article about something corrupt that a Republican did, and immediately there are (several) screeds about Obama. It's like the China shills that pop up every time there's an article critical of China.

There's no honest person who can be outraged at Christie's politically motivated law breaking, and content with the last 5 years of the same, time and again, from the president.

Translation: you're outraged that there would be an article about a corrupt act by a Republican, that isn't immediately "balanced" by a rant in the same article about unrelated corruption amongst Democrats.

This should be posted on a political forum. Maybe slashdot could create a second site for stories like this.

I think you have misunderstood the target of the referenced article. It is not actually about New Jersey politics, it is about the weakness of the NSA's justifications for its recently-revealed actions. Those actions seem to have attracted a lot of interest on slashdot.

Are you sure? I thought that while poor karma can give a negative starting score, it doesn't apply an "Insightful" (or any other tag) to the initial post. In other words, such posts would be labeled "Score: -1" as opposed to "Score: -1, Insightful". I thought only a "Insightful" mod by another user caused that label to be attached to a post.

I agree, but cold fjord didn't say he saw the post in its initial state. It displayed the same way for me, in a moderated/modified state.

Not to mention, of course, the most implausible tissue of rationales for it to appear HERE on a tech-news site.

"Let's see, we can cover it because we could suppose that the governor, if he actually had anything to do with it, could use the same tactics to defend himself that the NSA is using to defend themselves for doing the things the president ordered them to do!"

It's like supposing the motivations of a strawman of a strawman of a strawman who happens to use computers. Sheesh.

If you're talking about coverage via the "big six" US corporate news media, coverage depends partially on the political and economic interests of the parent corporation, and partially on the projected profitability of the coverage. The former could be determined somewhat by the legal bribes a corporation has given to political candidates. I'm not interested, as I don't share interests with any of those corporations. Thus, I don't get any of my news from them, instead preferring mostly foreign outfits with a

Don't be so hard on the media. It took them a year to break the IRS scandal news, and then they forgot about it once the President had some up with a barely plausible denial. It only took them 5 months to catch on to the bridge thing, and you can be they'll be talking about it until Christie has a serious conservative opponent.

So based on those two data points we have a press that is getting faster at recognizing scandals and is focusing on them longer. That's good, right?

Well and the fact that it wasn't just conservative/tea party groups that were targeted - plenty of liberal groups were as well. So it's unlikely this was done because of retribution or because of political ideology.

You probably need to factor in the fact that it is a local story in the NYC market. In my opinion, anything that happens in the NYC market gets amplified much more than other stories based on the fact that NYC is the center of media coverage.

You probably need to factor in the fact that it is a local story in the NYC market. In my opinion, anything that happens in the NYC market gets amplified much more than other stories based on the fact that NYC is the center of media coverage.

To be fair, it's not just the media concentration. New York is the largest, most important city in the nation.

My wife likes him because he didn't toe the party line when he needed help after Sandy.

I think he's a fucking hypocrite because he basically said Obama as a commie faggot until he, unexpectedly, needed more help than he could get from his own state. Then he became a sudden convert to the shared-risk model of disaster response which the Democrats seem to favor. He's lucky it happened at the end of the first term, 'cause three months later and I would have told him to suck it and go ask his Republican governo